Friday, October 10, 2014

It's Time

I have moved on to Word Press and want to focus on my goal of explaining Information Science to the public.

My major paper in graduate school (not really a thesis - I was not required to write one - but nevertheless submitted for peer review at The American Archivist) argued for this social science to be informed by the natural sciences and by information science. I actually corrected a prominent archivist and past president of the Society of American Archivists on facts of evolution and quantum physics as they touched the archives profession!

This is going to take a lot of developing, and so I shall attempt to do so at my new blog, Archive of Babel.
I shall also blog about atheism, of course, and hopefully complete A Galapagos Diary and my posts on The Extended Phenotype.

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

Weaving False Rainbows

We are going to die, and
that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they
are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my
place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains
of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats,
scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people
allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth
of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We
privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we
whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority
have never stirred?

While acknowledging the beauty and power of this sentiment,
Danaher replies:

If we stripped away the lyrical writing, what would
we be left with? To be more precise, what kind of argument would we be left
with?

Lyricism aside? I
almost laughed aloud at my computer as I read this. The beauty in language for
human beings is often in the language itself; stripped of its beauty, if there
is an argument to be made (and there is here, of course), that can be examined,
and Danaher is right to do so—but lyricism
aside, what would religion, or even science, or anything, be left with?

But let us examined the kernel of argument in this flowering
prose.

It is rather amusing to see atheists accused of having no sense of humor, then taken so literally when they joke or employ a
colloquialism. I did not see Dawkins’ use of the word “lucky” as an argument
strictly championing existence over nonexistence—he is merely stating that the
latter is far more likely than the former. We are “privileged” by the mere fact
of being the less likely ones, the elite, as it were. Dawkins is making an
observation, not a judgment, for the real focus of his quote is not
nonexistence, but the ordeal, and consciousness of, our impending deaths.

It is death that gives teeth to the statement of our
fortune. My evidence for this is, would Dawkins have made this statement if we,
the lucky living, were to live forever? The obvious answer is, of course not.
Dawkins is not really concerned with being “grateful” for existing, but with
putting death, much as it looms over our lives, into proper perspective.
Danaher has missed the point.

Moreover, it is not against the fear of death against which
Dawkins warns. When interviewed by physicist Brian Greene, who admitted
speaking to his dead father despite knowing that no ear heard him, Dawkins is
hardly surprised. I see no evidence of any exhortation to “quit whining.”
Rather, it is against the construction of
a fantasy afterlife which motivated Richard Dawkins to make this statement.

The response to the reality of death does not have to be “gratitude,”
and for Danaher to cast it as such leads us perilously toward another tiresome
design argument (to whom, or to what, shall we show “gratitude?”). Be grateful,
or not; be angry, or not; feel the fear, acknowledge the fear, but the point
is, however one reacts to death, no cri de coeur should ever result in a
denial of death’s reality and the subsequent exploitation of our natural human
fears by those who pretend to be travel agents for the “next world.” (As Susan
Sontag once said, “This world! As if there were any other.”)

Dawkins is, as always, arguing not against human feeling,
but against fraud.

Saturday, September 20, 2014

See, I Did Take Biology, but I Took a Different Kind of Biology, the One with the Creationism and the Private Truths!

It was not a good week for Bobby Jindal, of "The GOP should stop being the Party of Stupid" fame:

But what happens when a highly educated guy who did study science in college wants to run for national office in a party that increasingly stands against facts and science? In the case of Louisiana Governor and perennial presidential wannabee Bobby Jindal (R), you act dumb and make tortuous statements.

How dumb?

At a breakfast organized by The Christian Monitor, Jindal was introduced as a biology major, Rhodes Scholar, and former President of the University of Louisiana System. Naturally, at one point HuffPost’s Howard Fineman said, “I want to ask a couple of science questions.”
Jindal cluelessly fails to see what’s coming and excitedly interjects “I’m a biology major.”

Fineman is happy to repeat that point and, of course, then asks him a bunch of obvious science questions, including whether he accepts evolution.

So Jindal now feels compelled to explain, “I was not an evolutionary biologist.” Yeah, Jindal apparently got one of those Biology degrees from Brown University (with honors at the age of 20!) that doesn’t require learning about evolution — the central organizing principle of modern biology.

You can read the entire trainwreck of Bobby-Jindal-as-Private-Benjamin here.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Restoring the Forest

Last year and this one, Rev. Barky and I have been working to eliminate the buckthorn on the property, some of which is virgin Minnesota woods. This year we pulled out the garlic mustard as well, and native species are flourishing on our land once again. We have seen wild strawberry, raspberries, elderberries, honeysuckle (non-native and invasive, but not as bad as the buckthorn because the insects and birds still like it), Solomon's Seal and False Solomon's Seal, grapevines, Virginia Creeper, yarrow, clover, wild violets, and sumac.

Friday, March 14, 2014

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

You Miss Me! You Really, Really Miss Me!

Wow, you trolls! Do you come with your own bridge? :-D

Well, your Billie Goat Gruff here has seen through your teasing sarcasm and read the pleas that lurk beneath. You want me to resume posting? Okay, I shall! This is a good a place as any to park some of my new projects, and I never did finish my Galapagos Diary.

Since I last wrote, I have moved twice, finally into our permanent new home last year, and been a librarian and an archivist, working sub and contract, while holding down a steady part time job in eLearning development and APEX-ELM administration. I worked six days a week for nearly a year, ducks, and when I was not working I was throwing logs around and clearing Buckthorn on our new property. (Oh yes, I lost that "grad school thirty.")

I have also been involved in an internationally maintained online archive, and even been writing some fanfic. It's fun.

Friday, July 22, 2011

It's Time to Shut Down "Uncommon Descent," William Dembski!

Do you really want people like this writing curricula for schools? Barry Arrington at the Uncommon Descent blog writes:

A couple of months ago a young university student contacted my law office seeking help in a dispute she was having with a university here in Colorado. [To protect my client’s privacy, I am using neither her name nor the name of the university. ] The previous week she had voiced opposition to Darwinism to her biology professor, who proceeded to scream at her, denigrate her religious views, and generally demean and humiliate her in front of the rest of the class. After hearing her story I sent a demand letter to the university seeking redress. Good news. We resolved the matter on very favorable terms.

I have my doubts as to whether Mr. Arrington should be airing this story at all if it really happened; doing so could constitute an ethics violation. But if that were not troubling enough, he is holding a contest for the "best reply" to this alleged professor who supposedly dressed down a student for objecting to "Darwinism" (whatever that is).

Then, as if this were not enough navel-gazing, commenter and moderator KairosFocus proclaims this unnamed professor's actions to be rape. That's right - actual rape.

So a real rape victim replies, "As someone who has actually been raped before, I find your 'metaphor' despicable!" As do I. Well, the comment goes up...

...and gets a big dose of "You're a bad, bad girl!"

Oh, who isn't reminded of the actions of Jesse Ventura after Paul Wellstone's memorial? "Violated! *Sniff* I feel violated!"

But what truly pisses me off is that, in an earlier post, this same KairosFocus character claimed that how women dress should affect their rapist's guilt:

Oh yeah, right, KairosFocus.

Naturally, the pro-ID commenters have dug in about how this professor did in this supposedly true story committed "rape." One even found himself "laughing" at the objections to the rape metaphor. Well, do you know something? I do not find this funny at all, and neither would the most religious extremist who truly thought that someone had committed rape.

This blog is the most repulsive example of nihilism I have ever seen. After accusing PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins of "exhorting violence" and shitting repeatedly on the grave of Charles Darwin, they have the effrontery to equate an insult with rape a la Catherine McKinnon.

Intelligent Design cannot even differentiate between words and actions!

William Dembksi, it is time to shut down Uncommon Descent. You have lost the argument. You are done.